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Comment by pubby | Hacker News Reader

This strategy is low-risk but also low-reward. The most successful people in life often gain expertise in some specific, changing area, then get extremely lucky to have it pan out.

I think of the Admiral Chester Nimitz. All of his peers studied and worked on battleships because that's what the Navy had done for hundreds of years. But when WW2 entered the scene, Nimitz - the one guy studying the rapidly-changing area of submarines and aircraft carriers - was the one promoted to the highest command.

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Jeff Bezos might disagree about the "low reward."

“I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

Eh, this is kind of an odd statement here... He did take something that didn't change much and applied a lot of rapidly changing high technology to it. Much like Walmart before them, they did something kind of like everyone else was doing, but but their high risk, high reward twist on top of it.

Interesting that he identifies three things and then comments on the two which really ARE obviously true long term and not on the third which is much more debatable.

When I go to Amazon I'd often prefer a smaller selection of items for common categories, with better price/quality tradeoff information, and an assurance that I wasn't going to get an inferior substitute.

Not that it's an EASY problem to solve, particularly at Amazon's scale, but it's also the thing where it's most likely that a customer will come up and say "Jeff, I just want to be able to order a USB key that has the capacity it claims without having to wade through thousands of shady vendors".

Thanks for such compelling historical perspective!

The title should've been: "Focus on things that don't change (initially)"

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